Yesterday was the Previews Day at the SIIA Information Industry Summit. Previews is always my favorite part of the conference as it showcases early stage companies.
This year, there were ten presenting companies, split into two groups. The first group included more traditional content management and collaboration applications including:
- RSuite CMS, a content management platform from Really Strategies, which enables the easy creation, deployment and reuse of xml and other media files.
- Arity Corporation, a knowledge management platform for creating and sharing online notebooks.
- InsideView, a web 2.0 CRM platform.
- MixedInk, a collaboration application leveraging web 2.0 features such as wikis and community ratings.
- Prolifiq, allowing enterprise customers to effectively distribute content to clients.
The second group featured the following five companies:
- SBTV.com, a video news service focused solely on the small business community.
- Adgregate Markets provides an embeddable object enabling ecommerce transactions within a banner ad.
- Associated Content is an open content network matching content creators and brands.
- Management CV is a content company analyzing and ranking quality of management for CEOs and management teams of publicly-listed companies.
- Cell Journalist provides an integrated platform for news providers to connect with citizen journalists.
Among the more interesting presentations were:
- Vanessa Scanfield of MixedInk. MixedInk is a collaborative writing tool that leverages wikis and user ratings to collaboratively assemble a document. They've done some work in the political advocacy space, which makes a lot of sense. MixedInk is pretty cool, but it's a niche product that's probably more of a feature of a larger application. There's not a strong ROI attached to this as a standalone application, which may be a challenge, particularly in this market.
- InsideView is a customer intelligence application that melds information from sources like Hoover's, ZoomInfo and Jigsaw, combined with social media content from a user's Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. The resulting information is integrated within CRM systems like Salesforce.com. They use a freemium business model and have more than 200 professional customers.
- SBTV.com - CEO Susan Wilson Solovic is a former news anchor and her camera presence shows as she presents. SBTV is the only online video service dedicated to the small business user. As demand for video content increases, SBTV is well-positioned for growth.
- Management CV - content industry veteran Renny Ponvert has launched this new company, which analyzes CEO and management team performance using a number of quantitative measurements. In essence, they identify the management alpha - what part of a company's performance is attributable to management, as opposed to industry performance.
The highlight of the day (for me, at least) was the closing keynote, offered by Roger Ehrenberg.Roger is Managing Partner of IA Capital Partners and author of the Information Arbitrage blog. Roger's presentation focused on learning from failure, or "how to fail successfully". Those who read his blog are well familiar with Roger's post-mortem on Monitor110, which shuttered its doors this past summer.
His four key takeaways were
- The lack of a single leader
- Being too internally focused
- Too much PR too early
- Too much money
In answering the question of "how does one fail successfully?", Roger suggested three key factors:
- Humility (the ability to learn from failure)
- Insight (having the perspective to extract lessons learned from failure)
- Persistence (embodying the toughness to take that knowledge and try again)
Or, formulaically, Failure+Learning+Persistence = Success
